5
When Robert Ingersoll heard about Darwin’s theory of evolution, his immediate response was to ponder “how terrible this will be upon the nobility of the Old World. Think of their being forced to trace their ancestry back to the duke Orang Outang, or the princess Chimpanzee.”1 The first American reviewer of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, took a much more sober view of the subject in the March 1860 issue of the American Journal of Science and Arts. Gray was then America’s best-known botanist, a friend of Darwin’s, and a believing Protestant whose religious leanings were closer to traditional Calvinism than to the more liberal Unitarianism common among New England intellectuals on the eve of the Civil War. He was the first important American scientist to insist that there need be no conflict between religion and the theory of evolution by means of natural selection, in which organic change and the emergence of new species are explained by randomly arising variations, passed on to subsequent generations, that enable some organisms to compete more effectively than others in the struggle for existence. Creeds based on literal acceptance of the biblical creation story could not, of course, be reconciled with evolutionism, but advocates of a Christianized Darwinism, like Gray, could accept Darwin’s general principles (if not all of the particulars) without denying the existence of a divine first cause. Natural selection could therefore be viewed as the mechanism by which God chose to manifest himself throughout the physical world. Although this sounds like an early version of the current argument for the teaching of “intelligent design” in schools, there is one crucial difference: Gray was suggesting not that educators give equal time to a religious and a naturalistic version of evolution but that it was possible to teach evolutionary theory in entirely naturalistic terms without addressing the nonscientific issue, best left to the realm of faith, of whether God set the process in motion. This position, most recently endorsed by the influential paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in Rocks of Ages (1999), has held an enduring appeal for American scientists as well as theologians. For nineteenth-century religious liberals like the ubiquitous Henry Ward Beecher, who refused to turn their backs on either religion or the new scientific knowledge, Gray’s philosophical balancing act was heavensent. For freethinkers like Ingersoll, Darwinian evolution offered an unambiguous opportunity to explain in natural terms what had, for aeons, been explained solely in supernatural terms. For men of faith, however, Darwinism represented both opportunity and danger, a powerful natural theory of the origins and development of life that must somehow be reconciled with the traditional explanations offered by religion.
Gray himself was responding to the argument of his equally well known but much more religiously orthodox colleague, the geologist Louis Agassiz, who insisted that evolutionism inevitably led to atheism. Even a God who served as first cause and as an intelligent designer was not enough for Agassiz, who maintained that all life must be viewed by scientists as the product not only of original divine intent but of constant and continuing attention from the Deity, whose eye was on the sparrow, lizard, and amoeba, as well as on His noblest creation, man. Gray’s elegant summary of the basic philosophical difference between Agassiz and Darwin could just as easily be applied to the battle between creationists (though Agassiz was considerably less dogmatic than modern creationists) and evolutionists today:
In a word, the whole relation of animals, etc., to surrounding Nature, and to each other, are regarded under the one [Agassiz’s] view as ultimate facts, or in the ultimate aspect, and interpreted theologically; under the other [Darwin’s] as complex facts, to be analyzed and interpreted scientifically. The one naturalist, perhaps too largely assuming the scientifically unexplained to be inexplicable, views the phenomena only in their supposed relation to the Divine mind. The other, naturally expecting many of these phenomena to be resolvable under investigation, views them in their relation to one another, and endeavors to explain them as far as he can (and perhaps farther) through natural causes.2
The outbreak of the Civil War did nothing to dampen the interest of American scientists and intellectuals in the new ideas about evolution, but it delayed a wider public discussion of both the scientific and the religious implications of Darwin’s theories. As the subject of evolution began to engage the American public (as distinct from scientists) in the mid-1870s, debate extended beyond the relatively small intellectual community concerned with such matters in Europe. The broader scope of popular discussion in America disseminated information—and misinformation—about the new theory of how life developed. It was a debate with far-reaching implications, unforeseen at the time, for future American attitudes toward science, religion, and secularism. An 1873 editorial in the New York Times reflected the deep concern of social and religious conservatives about the impact of scientific rationalism on the American public. Adopting a tone similar to that of late-eighteenth-century conservatives, who feared that the French Revolution’s religious and economic radicalism would contaminate American workers and farmers, the Times argued that if the theories of Darwin “were confined to the walls of universities or the pages of scientific reviews, it would not be a matter of so much consequence, since their audiences would be both small and discriminating; but in fact, under the guise of science and philosophy, they give only too much color to the thought of the age, especially to that of the young and immature mind.” The editorial charged, with considerable justification, that scientists would “cooly rule the supernatural quite out of the universe with their dictum: ‘Prove it.’” Books containing dangerous scientific theories “lie upon the bookshelves in the houses of Christians, and such doctrines are served up in diluted, but none the less dangerous, form in the lecture platforms, in the magazine and the newspaper, and are too often taught in the college or the school.” Finally, the Times declared that it was the duty of journalists to do battle against the “prejudice against the supernatural” that science was attempting to instill in impressionable young minds. “‘The watchman on the walls of Zion’ can no longer afford to confound modern doubt with old or exploded heresies, or even to ignore them,” the editorial concluded. “Science should be confined to its own domain; the material should not encroach upon the spiritual, and youth should be taught that knowledge comes in other ways than by experiment.”3
The writer of that editorial would undoubtedly be pleased, were he alive today, to know that news of the death of belief in the supernatural was greatly exaggerated—and that nineteenth-century scientists and freethinkers greatly underestimated the staying power of conservative religion in American life. At the time, there seemed ample reason for Ingersoll to predict that scientific knowledge would inevitably replace what he considered superstition—or, at the very least, that a majority of Americans would comfortably accept separate spheres of influence for science and religion. In the late 1800s, acceptance of the scientific method in general and evolutionary theory in particular was unquestionably spreading—not only among the college-educated but among those with a secondary school education. As the number of American public high schools increased rapidly between 1870 and 1900, the new ideas about evolution made their way into the secondary school science curriculum. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church’s fear that the teaching of secular science in public schools might erode the faith of Catholic children was a major factor in the establishment of the nation’s first religiously based school system. Protestants outside the South, by contrast, rarely argued that it was the function of schools to teach the biblical creation story: it was the job of home and church to instill religious beliefs, to decide how to reconcile scientific evolutionism with faith, and to speculate about when or whether God had displayed his hand in the evolutionary process. That the teaching of secularist science in American public schools would surface repeatedly as an issue in the closing decades of the twentieth century, setting the United States apart from all other developed nations, would have been unimaginable to the nineteenth-century heirs of the Enlightenment.
To Darwin’s contemporaries, it soon became evident that the theory of evolution by means of natural selection posed a much greater threat to orthodox religion than geological discoveries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which had undermined biblically based notions of the age of the earth but had not shaken humanity’s view of itself as a uniquely created species, fashioned in God’s own image, unrelated to and with full dominion over the birds of the air and beasts of the field. In The Origin of Species, Darwin had avoided any explicit discussion of human evolution—though the inferences to be drawn from his general theory were evident to his scientific colleagues—but in The Descent of Man (1871) he unequivocally spelled out his view of the place of homo sapiens in nature.
“We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped,” he declared, “probably arboreal in its habits. . . . This creature, if its whole structure had been examined by a naturalist, would have been classed among the Quadrumana, as surely as the still more ancient progenitor of the Old and New World monkeys. . . . [A]ll the higher mammals are probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal, and this through a long series of diversified forms, either from some reptile-like, or some amphibian-like creature, and this again from some fish-like animal.”4Moreover, man’s connection with lower animals was indisputable in light of “the marvellous fact that the embryos of a man, dog, seal, bat, reptile, &c., can at first hardly be distinguished from each other.” Then Darwin uncompromisingly asserted that “only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods . . . leads us to demur to this conclusion. But the time will before long come, when it will be thought wonderful that naturalists, who were well acquainted with the comparative structure and development of man, and other mammals, should have believed that each was the work of a separate act of creation.”5
Darwin’s theory of human descent, coupled with astronomical discoveries that infinitely expanded previous concepts of the universe and reduced the earth to its real status as one small planet, struck a blow not only at the religious view of man as a special creation of God but at humanity’s exalted opinion of itself. “How insignificant we are, with our pigmy little world!” wrote Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) in an 1870 letter to his fiancée, Olivia Langdon. “[W]as our small globe the favored one of all? Does one apple in a vast orchard think as much of itself as we do? . . . Do the pismires argue upon vexed questions of pismire theology—& do they climb a molehill & look abroad over the grand universe of an acre of ground & say, ‘Great is God, who created all things for Us?’”6 Ingersoll, in an 1877 lecture, treated the likelihood of reptilian ancestry with a satirical equanimity that resembled Twain’s:
I read about rudimentary bones and muscles. I was told that everybody had rudimentary muscles extending from the ear into the cheek. I asked “What are they?” I was told: “They are the muscles with which your ancestors used to flap their ears.” I do not now so much wonder that we once had them as that we have outgrown them.
. . . I would rather belong to that race that commenced a skull-less vertebrate and produced Shakespeare, a race that has before it an infinite future, with the angel of progress beckoning forward, upward and onward forever—I had rather belong to such a race, commencing there, producing this, and with that hope, than to have sprung from a perfect pair upon which the Lord has lost money every moment from that day to this.7
For conservative religious believers, the application of Darwin’s theory to humans was not only blasphemous but ego-shattering. One critic noted that while the Bible “places a crown of honor and dominion on the brow of our common humanity . . . Darwinism casts us all down from this elevated platform, and herds us all with four-footed beasts and creeping things. . . . [I]t treats us as bastards and not sons, and reveals the degrading fact that man in his best estate—even Mr. Darwin—is but a civilized, dressed up, educated monkey, who has lost his tail.”8 Had that view prevailed among the leaders of mainstream Protestant sects in an era when Protestantism was the dominant American religion, educated Americans would have been forced to choose between their faith and the modern world. But since so many Protestant theologians and church leaders sought an accommodation between science and religion, many American Protestants could open themselves to new ideas and still take comfort in their faith.
For Catholics, no such compromise was possible. Between 1870 and 1900, the Catholic population of the United States rose from four million to twelve million, mainly because of immigration from Germany and southern and eastern Europe. Because most of the new American Catholics were poor and poorly educated, and because the church soon began establishing parochial schools to shelter Catholic children from secularist thought, the debate over evolution bypassed the fastest-growing segment of American religious believers. At the time, institutional Catholicism, under the leadership of Pope Pius IX, had adopted a hostile posture toward any scientific encroachment on religious authority. The pope, who had stifled rebellious modernizers within the church by foisting the new doctrine of papal infallibility upon the First Vatican Council in 1869, had also pushed an uncompromisingly antiscientific and antimodernist platform through the council. With a proclamation declaring “let him be anathema . . . [w]ho shall say that human sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions, even when opposed to revealed doctrine,” the pontiff set the Catholic hierarchy on a retrograde intellectual course that would remain unaltered until the second half of the twentieth century.9 Not until 1950, in the encyclical Humani Generis, did the church, under Pope Pius XII, arrive at the conclusion embraced by liberal Protestants as early as the 1870s—that believers might retain an open mind on the question of whether the human body evolved from lower life forms as long as they continued to regard the human soul as the direct creation of God. For American Protestants, however, it was already possible in the nineteenth century to choose the spiritually and socially easier course of embracing both some form of evolution and some form of God. Ingersoll predicted that liberal Protestantism’s qualified acceptance of evolutionism would create many more agnostics and freethinkers, and that did indeed happen during the “golden age of freethought” in the 1880s and 1890s. But the accommodationism of mainstream American Protestantism also had the effect of making agnostics, atheists, and uncompromising rationalists look like crackpots and extremists—an image that endures to this day. If the dominant Protestant religion was willing to bend its tenets to accommodate as unsettling a theory as Darwinian evolution, many, arguably most, Americans felt that scientific rationalists should be equally willing to accommodate comforting faith in a divine creator: refusal to adopt a “moderate” position—always equidistant from two points—was tantamount to radicalism. Twentieth-century American scientific accommodationists like Gould—usually not religious believers themselves but fearful of the threat to science from the unreconciled Christian right—are still bending over backward to reassure the public that there need be no conflict between science and religion. While the reconciliation of science with religion is certainly possible, for individuals as well as for a society, it is a mistake, albeit a soothing one, to suggest that the process is easy or automatic. The scientific method itself, with its demand (as the Times editorial rightly noted in 1873) to “prove it,” discourages the leaps of faith in the unverifiable that are the essence of any religion. That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.
In the post–Civil War era, the accommodationist response of so many Protestant leaders was only one of the social factors that shaped the nation’s reception of evolutionism and gave it a distinctly American character. The appeal of evolutionary theory was reinforced by a profound American faith in progress—never stronger, at least outside the former Confederacy, than in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. The reunified (in a governmental if not a cultural sense) United States was expanding in every possible way, from its large cities, swelled by immigration, to the western states, where previously untapped natural resources were being exploited to power the nation’s burgeoning economy. Between 1870 and 1900, the population nearly doubled as a result of immigration, from some thirty-eight million to more than seventy-four million. Americans were witnessing an unprecedented application of once abstract scientific principles to inventions that made the fortunes of the Gilded Age and reshaped everyday life. This was, after all, the era when man conquered the dark—at least in urban areas. Thomas Edison’s patenting of the first commercially viable incandescent lamp in 1879 was followed just three years later by the opening of the world’s first permanent electric-light power plant in New York City. The Centennial Exhibition of 1876, held in Philadelphia, was a spectacular celebration of American technology, featuring new inventions that included the telephone, the typewriter, and the prototype of the first galvanized cables (which would soon be used to build the Brooklyn Bridge). The main attraction was the 1,500-horsepower Corliss Steam Engine, taller than a house, which provided power for all the equipment in the fair’s vast machinery hall. The widespread public fascination with the new technology was borne out by the fair’s huge attendance: nine million Americans, out of a total population of forty-eight million, visited the exhibitions during the centennial year. While the Victorian faith in progress, and technology as an instrument of progress, was hardly unique to America, ordinary Americans’ view of their country as the leader of the forces of technology and invention was a powerful reinforcer of the sense of exceptionalism that had characterized the nation since its founding. It was, of course, possible to respond enthusiastically to technology while retaining grave suspicions about science—and that was the position of many religious conservatives. But the late-nineteenth-century advances in both scientific understanding and applied technology posed a particularly formidable challenge to orthodox religion because, taken together, they offered a logical explanation of processes once thought to be inexplicable curses or miracles. As understanding of natural causes expanded, the need for supernatural explanations decreased. And even if nineteenth-century medicine had little to offer in the way of treatment or cures for most of the diseases whose origins scientists were beginning to understand, there were notable exceptions. By the 1880s, some (though by no means all) American surgeons began to adopt the aseptic procedures pioneered by England’s Joseph Lister, and enlightened general practitioners came to understand that many infections could be prevented simply by keeping themselves and their patients clean. The bacterial explanation of infectious disease—originally considered as unproven a theory as evolution—began to gain greater acceptance, as educated Americans became aware of the findings of Louis Pasteur and the pioneering German bacteriologist Robert Koch.
Evolution was not a theory that offered immediate practical benefits, but, like the germ theory of the origins and transmission of disease, it stripped away the myth and mysticism from fundamental questions of how—though not why—organisms, including humans, live and die. Darwin could not account for the original source (which, for the religiously orthodox, could only be God) of the variations that led to natural selection and human evolution. But, as one historian notes, “what really mattered was not that an agnostic had ready at hand a scientific explanation for the origin of life, the formation of the solar system, or any other specific problem; rather, it was that he had the impression that science could provide one—if not right away, then eventually.”10 Informed by lectures and new journals founded for the specific purpose of explaining science to general readers, many educated Americans were no longer disposed to accept primitive “seeing is believing” arguments like the one made by the Reverend Thomas A. Eliot, who dismissed all fossil evidence for evolution because no one had ever witnessed one live animal turning into another.11 In the 1870s, daily mass-circulation newspapers also paid attention to discoveries supporting the theory of evolution. Among the most famous were fossil birds, with teeth and other reptile attributes, discovered in Kansas by the eminent paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh, one of the earliest and most effective popularizers of science in America. Those who attended the lectures of Marsh or of Thomas Huxley may not have witnessed the spectacle of a reptile turning into a bird, but the unearthing of a species with characteristics of both life forms powerfully suggested a common ancestry. Moreover, the spokesmen for conservative religious sects, with a faith based not only on the unseen but on phenomena that contradicted all the accepted laws of nature, were hardly in the best position to argue that only seeing justifies believing.
The extensive newspaper coverage devoted to Huxley’s 1876 visit to America reflected both the internationalization of high-level science and the intense public interest in, if not necessarily acceptance of, evolution. The agnostic Huxley, the most effective popularizer of Darwin’s ideas and a celebrity in his own right, was accompanied on his voyage to America by the London correspondent of the New York Tribune. As their ship steamed into New York Harbor, the correspondent noted that “Mr. Huxley stood on the deck of the Germanic. . . and he enjoyed to the full that marvelous panorama. At all times he was on intimate terms with Nature and also with the joint work of Nature and Man! . . . As we drew near the city . . . he asked what were the tall tower and tall building with a cupola, then the most conspicuous objects. I told him the Tribune and the Western Union Telegraph buildings. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that is interesting; that is American. In the Old World the first things you see as you approach a great city are steeples; here you see, first, centers of intelligence.’”12
That America was no longer regarded as a parochial backwater of science was demonstrated by Huxley’s speedy departure for New Haven and Yale College, where he was eager to see Marsh’s most recent fossil discoveries. Huxley, who planned to deliver a lecture in New York on the genealogy of the horse, had only studied European fossil specimens, while Marsh’s studies of fossils from the American West had led him to the conclusion that the horse originated in the New World rather than in Europe. Huxley spent several days talking with Marsh and going over his findings, and he revised his opinions—and his lecture—in the face of what he considered incontrovertible new evidence of the horse’s New World genealogy. In a later memoir, Marsh observed that Huxley’s willingness to “give up his own opinions in the face of new truth” indicated “the generosity of true greatness.”13 Huxley delivered three lectures before packed houses in New York, and a lengthy front-page account of his final address in the New York Times indicates the extent of the interest in evolution on the part of nonscientists, who only fifteen years earlier had probably never heard the name Charles Darwin:
Prof. Huxley’s third and final lecture was delivered last night at Chickering Hall, in the presence of one of the largest and most brilliant audiences which has yet greeted him in this country. The subject of his discourse was the “demonstrative” evidence in favor of the evolution theory, and consisted mainly of a description of the process by which the existing horse is to be traced back, step by step, to a lower form, which, in respect to its arms, hands, and teeth very nearly resembles that division of the mammals to which man belongs. . . . The lecturer added that in all probability, when the geological formation of the great Northwest could be thoroughly examined, a still more ancient species will be found, with a fifth finger or thumb on the forehoof, which will complete the series. Enough, however, had been discovered to demonstrate the truth of the evolution hypothesis—a truth which could not be shaken by the raising of side issues. . . . As to the only other imaginable hypothesis—that all those connected forms had come into existence at different times and by special creation—it was sufficient to say that not a particle of evidence of any kind had been adduced in its favor, while on the other hand, the truth of evolution was based upon precisely the same species of evidence as the Copernican theory of the movement of the sun and planets.14
In yet another demonstration of the long attention span of nineteenth-century audiences and readers, the Times followed its glowing synopsis with the full text of the speech, running to more than three columns. The positive tone of the extensive news coverage of Huxley’s speeches contrasted sharply with the disapproval voiced on newspaper editorial pages, reflecting the gap not only between controversial new scientific ideas and received opinion but between newspaper owners and reporters. The Times, which published five news stories and five editorial pieces on Huxley’s visit in less than two weeks, was given to heavy-handed mockery of its reporters’ “fanciful” enthusiasm for theories that “prove nothing” about the origins of human life. Reporters were young, injudiciously enthusiastic, and overly impressed by celebrities, the Times opined, and therefore readers ought not to pay too much attention to the theories reported in news columns. (The editorial page’s contradiction of the paper’s own news reports may have confused some readers, but it certainly attests to the separation between the news and editorial side of the nineteenth-century Times.) The editorial pronouncement on Huxley’s final lecture reflected, as always, the fundamental concern of conservatives within the American establishment—including leaders in publishing, finance, and government as well as the orthodox clergy—about the impact of evolutionary theory, should it become widely accepted, on religious faith. The Times position was that Darwinian evolution by means of natural selection must be modified in a fashion compatible with religion, just as literal accounts of the biblical creation story had been modified to uncover “a striking general coincidence between the Mosaic narrative and modern [geological] theories, and Biblical scholars have changed many of our former interpretations of these records.” The editorial writer dismissed Huxley’s analogy between the structure of the horse and human anatomy, adding that “for Mr. Huxley to speak of the evidence for evolution as being on a par with Copernican theory, only shows how far [astray] theory will lead a clear brain.”15
While most scientists, along with many other well-educated Americans, accepted some form of evolution by the early 1880s, their acceptance did not always extend to the Darwinian concept of natural selection as the primary agent of evolutionary change. Many American naturalists, especially those intent on reconciling science and religion, were drawn not to Christianized Darwinism but to the now discredited concept of evolution based on the eighteenth-century theories of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck. Lamarck argued that environmentally acquired characteristics could be passed on to the next generation and were responsible for most evolutionary development—a theory that dovetailed neatly with the American faith in progress. Darwin himself came to believe that the environment played a more important role in evolution than he originally thought, but he never wavered in his insistence that natural selection was the most important factor. It must be recalled that the entire nineteenth-century discussion of Lamarckism versus Darwinism took place without knowledge of the true laws of genetics, first laid out in 1866 by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel but ignored during his lifetime and rediscovered by independent researchers only in 1900. American neo-Lamarckists in the 1860s and 1870s believed in what they called the laws of “acceleration and retardation,” which specified that characteristics of an adult of one species could metamorphose into embryonic characteristics in the next higher species—thus “accelerating” the development of advanced traits and facilitating the emergence of a higher organism. Lacking knowledge of genes—encoded in reproductive cells from the beginning of each organism’s life—as the true bearers of heredity, the neo-Lamarckists could easily envision a form of evolution compatible with the special creation of man. By crediting the Creator with the power to actually reshape an organism during its lifetime in order to provide the biological building blocks for the next higher species, it was possible to see the direct hand of God not only as first cause but at every stage of development. Lamarck’s theory of the inheritability of acquired characteristics was particularly malleable for ideological ends, whether religious or political, precisely because it rejected any notion of random variations in the universe and insisted that species could have evolved only as the result of some all-encompassing plan.*
The muddling of science with unscientific ideology was most evident in Gilded Age America’s attraction to the turgid metaphysics of the British thinker Herbert Spencer, who applied Darwin’s principle of natural selection to the social as well as the natural world—a mistake Darwin never made. Trained as a civil engineer, Spencer dabbled in many branches of science, philosophy, and technology before finding his true vocation, in the words of the historian Richard Hofstadter, as “the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic.”16 Spencer was also the favorite philosopher of religious Americans who wished to have their God and evolution too, as a result of his insistence that however much science might have to teach about the natural world, there was still a place for religious worship of “the Unknowable.” Spencerian social Darwinism thus became that most suspect of all metaphysical systems—one flexible enough to be all things to all people, including those who would normally have been at one another’s throats. Even though Spencer himself is virtually unread today, his brand of social Darwinism, with its appeal to religious believers as well as to secularists, had a long-term impact on American culture. Hofstadter aptly defined American social Darwinism as a philosophy animated by “a kind of secular piety,” expressing a “naturalistic Calvinism in which man’s relationship to nature is as hard and demanding as man’s relationship to God under the Calvinistic system.”17 Never as influential in his native England as he was to become in America, Spencer began publishing his ideas several years before The Origin of Species (a fact to which he often alluded proudly). He combined belief in the inevitability of social progress with advocacy of laissez-faire economics and a minimal role for government; in his view, governmental intervention in society could only preserve the less fit at the expense of the more fit. Darwin’s concept of natural selection as the chief agent of evolutionary change fitted neatly into Spencer’s metaphysics: “survival of the fittest”—a term coined by Spencer, not Darwin—applied not only to man in a state of nature but to civilized man. It was a philosophy well suited to the deeply rooted American belief in individualism, as well as to the more rapacious business interests of the Gilded Age. Among Spencer’s greatest American admirers were Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and John D. Rockefeller. American sales of Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy, comprising more than six thousand pages written between 1860 and 1896, amounted to an astonishing 390,000 volumes by the time of his death in 1903. An example of Spencer’s logic (if it can be called that) appears in his 1858 account of the moment of awakening that led to all of his later philosophical works:
During a walk one fine Sunday morning (or perhaps it may have been New Year’s Day) . . . I happened to stand by the side of a pool along which a gentle breeze was bringing small waves to the shores at my feet. While watching these undulations I was led to think of other undulations—other rhythms; and probably, as my manner was, remembered extreme cases—the undulations of the ether, and the rises and falls in the prices of money, shares, and commodities. In the course of the walk arose the inquiry—Is not the rhythm of motion universal? and the answer soon reached was—Yes. . . . Of course these universal principles ranged themselves alongside the two universal principles I had been recently illustrating—the instability of the homogenous and the multiplication of effects.18
By “the instability of the homogenous,” Spencer meant that everything progresses from homogeneity, or simplicity, to heterogeneity and complexity—nebular gases turn into planets, embryos into more biologically complex adults, and, courtesy of Darwinian theory, lower species turn into higher. And let us not forget, as Spencer’s wealthy admirers never did, the progress from the simplicity of a single dollar to a diversified fortune, thanks to the “universal” rhythm of the financial markets.
Spencer translated the biological theory of natural selection into what he called “social selection,” opposing all state aid to the poor, public education, health laws, government tariffs, and even government-supported postal service. Of the poor, he declared, “If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die.”19 Or, as Scrooge put it, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Spencer’s political conservatism had much more appeal for American than for British intellectuals, who, as one British historian of science notes, were already drawn in the 1870s and 1880s to the “liberal socialism which is the special characteristic of modern Britain.”20 America’s more fluid class structure—of which the expansion of public education at every level was only one manifestation in the post–Civil War era—bolstered the appeal of the idea that individuals could succeed purely by their own efforts. One irony seemed lost on Spencer’s American enthusiasts: the nation’s expanding support for public education, which Spencer deplored, provided far more opportunities for the “fittest” of the poor to succeed than did the restrictive privately financed schools prevalent throughout so much of the Old World.
Although there is nothing mysterious about the appeal of Spencerian thought to the most reactionary American robber barons, it is more difficult to understand why he was taken so seriously by a great many Americans not identified with extreme conservatism. Many freethinkers and religious liberals were admirers of Spencer’s unrestrained individualism even though, unlike Spencer, they recognized the need not only for basic government services like the post office but for social action to ameliorate the harshest aspects of industrial capitalism. Carnegie, to cite just one example, helped found a system of public libraries that became a model of partnership between the public and private sectors of the economy. Social Darwinism seemed to hold a particular fascination for erudite Americans in the humanities, who often had trouble distinguishing between physical science and metaphysical speculation. The eminent historian and philosopher John Fiske, who delivered the main address at a farewell banquet for Spencer after his widely publicized American lecture tour in 1882, offered a comparison of the significance of Darwin and Spencer that would rank high on any all-time list of historical misjudgments. In Fiske’s view, Spencer’s magnum opus was “so stupendous that that of Darwin is fairly dwarfed in comparison.” Had Spencer never lived, Fiske added, Darwin’s theory of evolution would probably have been forgotten.21Fiske went on to pay tribute to Spencer for helping to reconcile evolution and religion, in a revealing passage that invokes divine sanction for the application of the “survival of the fittest” principle to civilized man. He told his affluent audience that when “we see that the very same forces, subtle, and exquisite, and profound, which brought upon the scene the primal germs of life and caused them to unfold, which through countless ages of struggle and death . . . cherished the life that could live more perfectly and destroyed the life that could only live less perfectly. . . . Human responsibility is made more strict and solemn than ever, when the eternal Power that lives in every event of the universe is thus seen to be in the deepest possible sense the author of the moral law that should guide our lives, and in obedience to which lies our only guarantee of the happiness which is incorruptible—which neither inevitable misfortune nor unmerited obloquy can ever take away.”22
In other words, the fittest men—those who will survive and prosper regardless of what natural or social misfortunes come their way—are those who “live right” as a higher power commands. The perennial appeal of this idea to Americans, in a line running from Ben Franklin through Norman Vincent Peale to more recent self-help gurus of every ilk, explains a good deal about Spencer’s relatively higher status in the New World than in the Old. Darwin himself offered much less fodder for those who wished to extend his conclusions about man in a state of nature to man in a state of civilization. He was no believer in the inevitability of progress, divinely guided or otherwise, and observed that history provides little support for such generalizations. “Ancients did not even entertain the idea,” he noted, “nor do the Oriental nations at the present day.” Progress, Darwin observed, “seems to depend on many concurrent favorable conditions, too complex to be followed out.”23 One of those conditions, he added, was a cool or temperate climate. Furthermore, Darwin stated explicitly that natural selection becomes subordinate to environmental factors—and man’s own moral evolution—as soon as humans enter into a state of civilization. Civilized societies, he said, care for both the physically and the mentally deficient and allow them to reproduce. “The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy,” he observed, “which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. . . . [I]f we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”24 The real difference between Darwin and Spencer lay in the former’s devotion to the scientific method—an empirically based search for truth grounded in awareness that new evidence may always pose a challenge to previous conclusions. Darwin was not reluctant to reevaluate his ideas, as he did in crediting environmental influences with a greater role than he had in The Origin of Species, and he carefully noted exceptions along with general rules. Spencer, by contrast, tied up everything—from the discovery of new planets to improved plumbing—in a grand metaphysical scheme that did not allow for new and contrary pieces of evidence.
The public debate over evolution—whether conducted in small-town lecture halls or in the elegant urban clubs where businessmen gathered to assure themselves that their fortunes were evidence that they were indeed the fittest—was largely a northern affair. So, too, was the attempt by theologians and church leaders to reconcile evolutionism and religion. No such geographical split existed in the intellectual life of any other Western nation. In the postbellum era, the religious divide between North and South, rooted in the relationship between southern churches and slavery, widened and hardened. New ideas were identified with the hated Yankees—and evolution was certainly a new idea. Just as abolitionists and women’s rights advocates left the South in the 1820s and 1830s, so did intellectual dissenters and scientists head North in the 1870s. The 1832 expulsion of Thomas Cooper for heresy from the faculty of the College of South Carolina was a preview of the thoroughgoing postwar southern spurning of anything, and anyone, identified with racial, political, and religious change, and that continuing rejection would retard southern economic progress for nearly a century. In 1878, two years after Huxley’s triumphant series of lectures in the Northeast, the geologist Alexander Winchell was dismissed from the faculty of Vanderbilt University in Nashville for publishing his opinion that human life had existed on earth long before the biblical time frame for the creation of Adam. Winchell’s firing was enthusiastically endorsed by Methodists in the region, who pointed out that Vanderbilt was a school founded by Methodists and dedicated to the goals of the church, and that contemporary scientific theories could only lead students astray from the path of true faith. Northern scientists and theologians scoffed at the southern Methodists, noting that mainstream Protestant thinkers had long accepted geological findings on the antiquity of the earth. “The stupid Southern Methodists that control the university, it seems, can learn nothing,” wrote Popular Science Monthly editor E. M. Youmans, setting the tone for a century of patronizing commentary by northern intellectuals on the South.25 While religious opposition to evolutionism did surface periodically in the North, it never occupied the dominant position that it almost effortlessly achieved within the southern religious establishment. The lasting consequences of this old cultural division remain apparent today; it is no accident that the South and the Southwest formed the geographical and ideological center of the Christian right in late-twentieth-century America. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Bob Jones, to name only a few stalwarts of right-wing fundamentalism, are the religious and political heirs of the nineteenth-century ministers and politicians who were determined to purge scientific rationalists from southern churches and educational institutions.
The growing knowledge and acceptance of evolutionism—even though it bypassed important segments of American society—contributed significantly to a major expansion of the freethought movement in the United States in the 1870s and 1880s. Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection was particularly persuasive to those who moved during this period from liberal Protestantism to outright agnosticism—a list that included such prominent personalities as Charles Eliot Norton—the future president of Harvard—and the feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Nineteenth-century agnostics and freethinkers were even more sensitive than their twentieth-century heirs to the charge that there could be no morality in the absence of religion, and they felt an urgent need to articulate a humanistic code of behavior that did not depend on belief in a system of divine rewards and punishments. Science made an important contribution to this secularized morality not because it had answers for perennial metaphysical questions but because it placed high value on the pursuit of truth through observation, experimentation, and constant questioning.
In the absence of the Christian faith in immortality, there was no question of greater importance to agnostics than the manner in which they proposed to face suffering and death. Freethinkers could find no evidence in nature of a God who took any active interest in human affairs, nor could they believe in the miraculous resurrection of the body that lay at the heart of Christian faith. For those who accepted Darwinian evolution by means of natural selection, the philosophical problem was particularly acute. It was impossible to reconcile natural selection—which involved competition, suffering, death, and the extinction of entire species—with the concept of an intelligent, omnipotent, and benevolent deity. Why would a kind God choose such a cruel way of determining who would live and who would die? Moreover, the Victorians confronted the harshest exigencies of natural selection, in the form of deaths in infancy and childhood, far more frequently than their twentieth-century descendants. Science might one day provide an antidote to the common diseases that, in 1870, took the lives of half of all urban infants before their first birthday, but that time had not yet come. The agnostic must bear his losses, and find a way to carry on, without the faith and hope that sustained his Christian neighbor— “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know, even as also I am known.” Yet many freethinkers, not surprisingly, found themselves unable to face those losses without the hope that some form of consciousness might continue after death. Some believers in a nonhierarchical, personal religion, among them William Lloyd Garrison, turned to spiritualism—strongly opposed by conventional churches—after the death of a beloved family member. Even the tough-minded Anthony, who considered herself an agnostic, mused that “if it be true that we die like the flower, leaving behind only the fragrance . . . what a delusion has the race ever been in—what a dream is the life of man.”26 There is a special place in the pantheon of rationalist heroes for the short list of freethinkers, including Ingersoll and Ernestine Rose, who unflinchingly and unfailingly rejected the idea that it was possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Stalwarts of the freethought press and lecture circuit like B. F. Underwood turned to spiritualism in their later years even as they continued to reject the miracles of the Bible as pure superstition. To George E. Macdonald, a staff member of the Truth Seeker, America’s best-known freethought newspaper, beginning in 1875, and its editor from 1909 to his death in 1937, there was no mystery about why so many aging warriors were swept up in the spiritualist enthusiasms of post–Civil War America. In a charming memoir published in 1932, Macdonald spoke of numerous friends who had turned to spiritualism or some other form of mysticism in their old age. “I have known men, once Freethinkers, to lean toward Christian Science, even Bahaism,” he recalled. “And I have ceased to wonder thereat, not because I can explain their action, but because I have seen so many of them and they are no longer novelties—not even an individualist turning authoritarian. Doubtless their state of reaction may be called a spiritual second childhood, matching that of the body and mind. Like children, the aged must play it safe.”27 Any agnostic who did not play it safe faced the stringent task of constructing an ethical system that dealt with suffering and extinction—one’s own as well as that of the human species—as a part of nature rather than as a cog in the machinery of divine justice. Nature could be modified not through the supernatural intervention of one God or many spirits but only through greater medical and scientific understanding.
When Huxley’s beloved three-year-old son died unexpectedly in 1860, a close friend, the pious but open-minded Episcopal clergyman and author Charles Kingsley, suggested that the grieving father would derive spiritual comfort if he could only bring himself to believe in some form of life beyond the grave. Huxley’s reply is a poignant classic of uncompromising secular humanism:
As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as part of his duty, the words, “If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. . . . I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because I am face to face with death and irreparable loss, because I have given back to the same source from whence it came, the cause of a great happiness . . . I am to renounce my manhood, and howling, grovel in bestiality? Why, the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grief [sic] out and do not immediately seek distraction in a gorge. . . .
If at this moment I am not a worn-out, debauched, useless carcass of a man, if it has been or will be my fate to advance the cause of science, if I feel that I have a shadow of a claim on the love of those around me, if in the supreme moment when I looked down into my boy’s grave my sorrow was full of submission and without bitterness, it is . . . not because I have ever cared whether my poor personality shall remain distinct for ever from the All from whence it came and whither it goes. . . .
I know right well that 99 out of 100 of my fellows would call me atheist, infidel, and all the other usual hard names. As our laws stand, if the lowest thief steals my coat, my evidence (my opinions being known) would not be received against him.*
But I cannot help it. One thing people shall not call me with justice and that is—a liar. As you say of yourself, I too feel that I lack courage; but if ever the occasion arises when I am bound to speak, I will not shame my boy.”28
Huxley’s surviving son considered this intimate letter, in an era when respectable men and women did not broadcast their private sorrows to the world, important enough to be included in a volume of selected letters published in 1900, just five years after his father’s death.
Because the deaths of small children were so common—and because they produced a special agony for those who had no hope of reunion with winged holy innocents in heaven—the secular sermons delivered at funeral services for the children of freethinkers provide a moving insight into the way agnostics attempted to bear the unbearable. At an 1882 burial service for a friend’s child, Ingersoll delivered what became one of his most widely reprinted speeches. “Every cradle asks us ‘Whence?’” he told the grieving parents, “and every coffin ‘Whither?’ The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions just as well as the robed priest of the most authentic creed. The tearful ignorance of the one, is as consoling as the learned and unmeaning words of the other. . . . If those we press and strain within our arms could never die, perhaps that love would wither from the earth. May be this common fate treads from out the paths between our hearts the weeds of selfishness and hate. . . . They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and nobler the faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only the perfect rest.”29
One of the glories of nineteenth-century freethought was that its most passionate adherents never laid claim to the absolute knowledge professed by congregants of orthodox faiths. Freethinkers did not hesitate to describe atheism and agnosticism as faiths like any other, often using the term religion in a secular sense to define an ethical and metaphysical system grounded in the search for truth rather than in the conviction of having found the truth. The scientific method, combining inductive and deductive reasoning, was very much a part of the secularist religion, but true freethinkers did not make a religion out of science itself. At a widely publicized though much-mocked national freethinkers’ convention held in upstate New York in 1878, a Cornell University professor memorably summarized the secularist freethought creed. “We have or may have a religion of unselfish devotion to others and to our own highest ideals,” he prophesied, “a religion of character, of abiding enthusiasm for humanity, and of complete intellectual honesty. Into our little human lives it will bring something of the grandeur of these infinite surroundings, a high purpose amid which and for which we live.”30
*In the twentieth century, Joseph Stalin’s anointed biologist, Trofim D. Lysenko, would take the same incorrect theory, with disastrous consequences for Soviet science, in a political rather than a religious direction. With the ringing proclamation that “the zygote is no fool,” Lysenko insisted—rejecting the Mendelian laws never known to the previous century’s neo-Lamarckists—that not only could acquired characteristics be transmitted from one generation to the next but those characteristics could be modified by changes in the political and social as well as the natural environment. Pushed to an extreme by zygotes even more foolish than the one that produced Lysenko, the theory not only wrecked Soviet agriculture for generations but also was used by Communist Party hacks to promote the notion that a Soviet upbringing, free of “bourgeois individualism,” could modify the genes that make up the human brain and produce a new homo Sovieticus. Lysenkoism was a joke to the rest of the scientific world by the 1930’s, but it was no joke in Stalinist Russia and led to the imprisonment and deaths of thousands of Soviet researchers with the courage to stand up for scientific truth. (For a fuller discussion, see The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko by Zhores Medvedev [1969] and A Question of Madness by Zhores and Roy Medvedev [1971].)
*England, like many American states (but unlike the U.S. government, with its constitutional provision banning religious tests for any “public trust”), prohibited those who refused to take an oath on the Bible from testifying in court.